Kevin Frisch: The late and the great from the Empire State

“When she went to New York, she quickly became a New Yorker with the Yankees hat and the upstate listening tour.” — Chris Matthews, MSNBC’s Hardball (April 21)

Kevin Frisch

“When she went to New York, she quickly became a New Yorker with the Yankees hat and the upstate listening tour.”
— Chris Matthews, MSNBC’s Hardball (April 21)

It has recently come to light that certain high-decibel, political television talkers,
Have suspicions about whom, among the world of the well known, are actually New Yorkers.

Which is why they’ve asked me, poet and Empire Stater Ogden Nash,
To provide a course in our state’s greats that can only be described as “crash.”

New York has been the birthplace of singers, scientists, writers and others.
Manhattan, for instance, boasted Sammy Davis Jr., Paddy Chayefsky, Norman Rockwell and the Marx Brothers.
The boroughs included Barbra Streisand, Vince Lombardi, Jerome Kern and Agnes de Mille.
Margaret Sanger was from Corning. Aaron Copland was from Brooklyn. George Eastman was from Waterville.
Jonas Salk
Was from New York.

The Empire State boasts George Gershwin, Jackie Gleason, Edward Hopper and Ethel Merman,
Not to mention Wharton, Edith; Whitman, Walt; and Melville, Herman.
We claim Charles Evans Hughes, Lou Gehrig, Woody Allen, Barbara Stanwyck,
Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Mickey Rooney and Mario Cuomo, who hails from Queens, which you can get to by taking the Van Wyck.
Tom Cruise
Is from Syracuse.

There was George Abbott, Bret Harte, Maria Callas, Michael Jordan and Lucille Ball,
As well as George Westinghouse, Christopher Reeve, Red Jacket and the Rockefellers, John D., Nelson, et. al.
We claim Linus Yale, the inventor; Louis Comfort Tiffany, the craftsman; and Learned Hand, the juror.
Along with presidents Millard Fillmore, Teddy Roosevelt, Martin Van Buren and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who got us through the Great Depression and helped defeat the Fuehrer.
Sean “Puffy” Combs
Has several New York homes.

There seems to be no end to famous folk born under the “Excelsior” motto,
Including the guy who founded Woolworth’s, the man who invented the Pullman rail road car and the musicians in that goofy ’80s rock band, Blotto.
Not to mention John Jay, Billy Joel, Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Rosie O’Donnell, Frank Langella, Howard Stern,
Claire Danes, Tupac Shakur, Julia Ward Howe, Washington Irving and Penny Marshall (she played Laverne).
And, of course, let’s
Not forget the Mets.